Walmart’s fresh summer
offerings now features new varieties of labor strife, available in
English and Chinese.

照片

On the retail empire’s home
turf in Bentonville, Arkansas, workers gathered at a media
conference organized by the advocacy network Making Change at
Walmart, to denounce Walmart’s low wages and hostility to labor
organizing.

Margaret Hooten of
Placerville, California, who earns less than $11 an hour after
starting at $9 five years ago, lamented, “Walmart can afford to pay
its workers, they just won’t. They don’t care. It is corporate
greed in its lowest form.”

Zhang Jun helps lead the
fledgling Wal-Mart Chinese Workers’ Association (WCWA), an
independent group that pushes for many of the same reforms US
Walmart workers seek, like job security and real collective
bargaining rights. But there’s one difference: In China, Walmart is
a union shop. Sort of.

The All-China Federation of
Trade Unions (ACFTU) nominally represents all of China’s workers,
via a latticework of regional labor bodies along with
workplace-level locals. In actuality, the ACFTU’s leadership is
often aligned with Communist Party officialdom and corporate
management rather than workers. Walmart negotiated to allow the
ACFTU to establish local branches at mainland stores in 2006, but
grassroots labor advocates say the unions have so far done little
for workers other than suppress unrest.

Activists like Zhang Jun are
part of an increasingly militant rank-and-file movement, which runs
a loose network of about 5,000 Walmart workers across China,
organized through social media, and has forged ties with labor
advocates in Hong Kong and even the United States, with an open
letter expressing solidarity. Though Walmart’s China operations
count for just 3 percent of global retail sales (contrasting with
China’s outsized manufacturing role in Walmart’s supply chain),
they employ more than 100,000 workers at 433 outlets in 169 Chinese
cities.

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The Walmart brand itself turns
out to be an ideal organizer. The plans to introduce “flexible”
schedules as part of a workforce “optimization” program have
galvanized workers’ anger across China, along with rising fears of
labor deregulation.

Zhang Jun tells The Nation
that under the initiative, workers would face intensified workloads
and be deprived of legal recourse to challenge unfair schedule
policies in the civil legal system. The destabilization of working
conditions would “potentially make workers more fearful and less
assertive in voicing their concerns on various grievances in terms
of organizing unions,” he adds.

Walmart in China contends the
“flexibility” initiative has “support from the majority of
employees,” but it would “maintain open communication with” others
“who are temporarily unable to understand,” reports The Sixth Tone.
Walmart Corporate representative Marilee McInnis states via e-mail
that the system “will enable Walmart to execute strategic talent
management.”

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But worker-turned-activist
Zhang Liya says via e-mail that the plan was unilaterally imposed
with virtually no worker consultation except among top union
officials. Although “labor law requires companies to submit its
[planned] change and seek approval,” he argues, the company has
instead “coerce[d] workers.”

Zhang Liya is familiar with
such coercion in his former workplace, store 1059 in the southern
city Shenzhen, where he tried last winter to launch an insurgent
campaign for president of his local. He gained broad support with a
social-media campaign decrying a sclerotic union leadership that
failed to defend workers’ job security. According to labor
activists, the management reacted by systematically pressuring
coworkers not to support his bid and suggesting his campaign was a
product of “foreign interference.” In a speech, Zhang Liya lashed
out at the management, calling their tactics “a violation of
Walmart’s corporate culture.”

Zhang Jun, who has also left
Walmart but continues to organize workers, has launched a scathing
online petition to oppose the scheduling reforms and to demand more
democratic union elections for direct collective-bargaining
representatives.

This time, the organizers have
won the support of local leaders with Shenzhen’s ACFTU branch.
Provincial vice chair Wang Tongxin told fellow union officials, “We
should listen to the workers’ demands and bring those demands to
the higher-level unions,” according to a May report by Hong
Kong-based China Labor Bulletin.

But Zhang Liya recalls that
during Walmart’s first decade, 1996 through 2006, “Walmart workers
were fortunate…. Workers’ salaries were more than three times of
the average salaries in Shenzhen.” Since then, however, “after
management controlled Walmart unions’ election, salaries and
benefits have gone down year after year, and salaries are now only
30 to 40 percent of the average incomes in
Shenzhen.”

China’s workers are demanding
more nationwide, as average salaries for urban workers have nearly
doubled since 2004, particularly in high-cost boomtowns like
Shenzhen. Even the city’s monthly minimum wage has risen steadily,
while Walmart’s pay scales have apparently failed to keep up with
overall growth.

Though allowing nominal unions
at Walmart raised faint hopes of genuine labor empowerment, Zhang
Jun says, “currently the union just sort of agrees to whatever
management decides in terms of firing workers,” and fails to
protect workers from retaliation for organizing. Though WCWA
doesn’t advocate forming a full-fledged breakaway union, it is
urging ACFTU leaders to follow its mandate and enable workers to
directly participate in “collective bargaining on equal terms with
management.”

While Beijing may covet
Walmart’s retail business mode as a symbol of China’s new
prosperity, from a labor perspective, American big-box stores are
hardly a model to emulate. In an open letter to Walmart and fellow
workers, Zhang Jun noted the struggles of the Fight for 15 campaign
marks a troubling harbinger for China’s workforce. “We have reasons
to believe Walmart China will follow the US example to adopt the
system of [flexible] hourly workers completely, and the current
Flexible Working Hour Scheduling only prepares for the
transition.”

Could an emerging global
Walmart labor culture now form a transnational front against
Walmart’s corporate culture? Perhaps workers like Margaret Hooten
would never have thought US Walmart would drag down Chinese labor
standards in the “race to the bottom,”’ or that Chinese workers
might offer lessons in organizing. But whatever the bureaucratic
constraints, WCWA’s growing militancy points just might inspire the
US counterparts who struggle to coordinate one-day strikes, store
by store.

So maybe Walmart’s Chinese
incarnation isn’t just a sign of globalization of a corporate
hegemony, but an incipient globalized rank-and-file movement,
purpose-built for a shrinking world.